Some types of communications in packet-based networks demand very small latencies in end-to-end transmission time. For some applications, even delays on the order of milliseconds can adversely affect a desired outcome, such as buying or selling a security at a target price. Conventional “store-and-forward” techniques, however, introduce additional latency because the network devices implementing the techniques (e.g., bridge devices) must wait to receive and buffer an entire packet before beginning to forward the packet to a next device. For large packets, this delay can be significant.
One known technique that generally helps to reduce latency is referred to as “cut-through” processing. With cut-through processing, a network device processes a portion (e.g., a header) of a packet, and begins to forward/transmit the packet from a transient buffer to a next device, before the entire packet has been received at the transient buffer and written to a queuing memory.